6 ms·

Having recently watched The Patent Scam, I wish more companies would follow suit here and exit EDOT, maybe then people would wake up and demand that these corru

• mchannon 8y ago
  Federal judges aren't the sort that get voted out. They're appointed for life. The degree and direction of corruption within a judge bear a striking resemblance to the president who appoints them.
  • HenryBemis 8y ago
    Leaving the political opinions aside (especially since I don't vote in the USA), I believe that USA has one strong/clean/independent Justice system. There is transparency. I don't believe that in many other modern/western countries there is so much attention to the top judges. I understand that people don't like either "Barack", or "Donald", and others before them, especially calling them by their first name as if they are friends or cousins. But just for fun, let's see if anyone from Belgium, UK, Greece, Spain, etc can name 5 top judges. I, for one, cannot :) Sidenote: I'm not a US citizen, nor live in the USA.
    • cameronh90 8y ago
      While this is true, also remember how powerful the US supreme court is. Due to a combination of common law (binding precedent) and an old, difficult to change, ambiguous constitution, the US Supreme Court is arguably even more powerful than the president.
      • vageli 8y ago
        > While this is true, also remember how powerful the US supreme court is. Due to a combination of common law (binding precedent) and an old, difficult to change, ambiguous constitution, the US Supreme Court is arguably even more powerful than the president. To me, this is an amazing aspect of the American justice system. Nine individuals, chosen over a broad range of years, are the last bastion of hope in keeping the current politics du jour from running amok. Nine individuals who were most likely all not chosen by the same person, have multitudinous alignments and bring their various perspectives to the table. When they come together in agreement, it is undoubtedly just given their diversty over the decades. Or at least in theory.
        • jeffdavis 8y ago
          SCOTUS is quite restrained, meaning that a lot of the power is in the lower courts.
        • cameronh90 8y ago
          There are interesting parallels there to the House of Lords in the UK, which more often than not holds the government to account better than the Commons. It does seem that sometimes pure democracy needs tempering. (Curiously, the House of Lords was the top court in the UK before the Supreme Court was created recently)
    • jdietrich 8y ago
      If the chief executive of a water company or an electricity company became a household name, my first assumption would be that there was some kind of scandal. Infrastructure is supposed to be boring. Britain has a supreme court, but I couldn't name any of the judges. They don't tend to make particularly controversial decisions, nor are they divided along partisan lines. I vaguely recall The Daily Mail describing some high court judges as "enemies of the people" due to some sort of Brexit-related shenanigans, but it all blew over within a couple of days; the overwhelming consensus was that the headline was crass and slanderous. Other than that, I don't recall the last time the judiciary were particularly newsworthy.
    • scarejunba 8y ago
      > But just for fun, let's see if anyone from Belgium, UK, Greece, Spain, etc can name 5 top judges. I, for one, cannot :) I wonder how many people can name Norman Borlaug and what he did vs Adolf Hitler and what he did.
  • tylerl 8y ago
    Well... They CAN be voted out... Its a vote that's not regularly held, you have to be personally nominated for being voted out, and you need a 2/3 majority of the Senate to vote against you...
• repiret 8y ago
  Federal judges are appointed by the President and serve for life. There are possibly corruption problems in the Eastern district of Texas, but the root problems are the patent laws themselves, and its the elected members of congress who can fix that.
  • munk-a 8y ago
    (wearing my project management hat) Fix the easy problems first, then fix the hard ones.
  • paulgb 8y ago
    I'm curious about another root problem: why are corporate civil cases heard by a jury in the first place? Never mind that juries are bound to be influenced when billions of dollars are at stake[1], how about the fact that these cases are both technically and legally complex? I'm not an expert in this stuff but as far as I can tell the USA is unique in allowing juries to hear this sort of trial, even among countries with a right to jury in a criminal trial. 1. E.g. the Samsung skating rink in front of the Marshall Texas courthouse
    • amanaplanacanal 8y ago
      It's the seventh amendment to the constitution. Amendment 7 - Rights in Civil Cases In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States than according to the rules of the common law.
• jld 8y ago
  The only people who can vote federal judges off the bench are 67 senators.
  • CalChris 8y ago
    Federal judges are nominated by the President and confirmed (majority) by the Senate. Technically judges serve during Good Behavior, Article III, but that's been interpreted as lifetime. Removal is by impeachment in the House (majority) followed by conviction (two thirds) in the Senate.